Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: ordo cognoscendi - essendi; ordo compositionis: für intelligente Studenten

Kurzinhalt: The Two Ways of Learning; as Aristotle has it, from objects we learn to specify acts; from acts, potencies; from potencies, essences

Textausschnitt: .... As Aristotle has it, from objects we learn to specify acts; from acts, potencies; from potencies, essences. All human discovery proceeds, at least in the first instance, according to the ordo cognoscendi. But whenever this process comes to a term and the inquirer attains knowledge of some essence or other cause, he or she also grasps, as a consequence, the ordo essendi. For explanation is synthetic: it includes a grasp of implications, so that in understanding an essence one knows and can demonstrate logically what potencies it grounds, what the acts of those potencies are, what the objects of those acts are; in understanding a cause, one knows and can demonstrate its effects. (32; Fs)
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84/1 Lonergan employs this same distinction in De ente supernaturali. The ordo resolutionis proceeds from revealed truths to their intelligible ordering (de veritatibus revelatis ad eorum ordinationem intelligibilem procedit); the ordo compositionis descends from an intelligible ordering to the things that are to be ordered (ex intelligibili ordinatione ad ordinanda descendit) (DES:3). The latter is the order governing the arrangement of the subject-matter in De ente supernaturali. Thus, Lonergan does not structure that treatise by assembling and analysing scriptural statements and then working his way gradually towards an explanation of the gratuity of grace; instead he begins with a treatment of supernatural being because it is the synthetic intelligibility that, by providing a way of ordering the dogmatic data, explains the gratuity of grace. To refer to supernatural being as abstractissimum, then, is simply to draw attention to its highly synthetic character. (33; Fs)